The Presence Of An Absence
by Theiry
Summary: Tony's thoughts during the graveside service.Yet another post Twilight fic. More chapters to come. Rating for language.
1. Default Chapter

Disclaimer: If I owned them I wouldn't be compelled to write this. And I have no beta, so the mistakes are mine.

**Presence Of An Absence**

**  
**_"...if you can get through the twilight, you'll live through the night."_

_-Dorothy Parker_

It didn't rain.

He thought it should've and deep down he'd expected it to. He'd expected nature itself to join him in his grief and he felt cheated, betrayed and so very, very pissed off that it hadn't. He'd stood there, Gibbs on one side, Abby on the other, trying not to hear her mother's sobs as the Priest went on and on about the eternal nature of the soul and the great hereafter, sweating in his black Armani, growing more livid with every passing second.

Where was the fucking rain?

Kate was dead , _dead, _and the sun was beating down on them, the birds were singing; the sky was so goddamn blue you wanted to cry. And he did, only that hadn't been the reason why.

The world kept going on around him as if everything were normal and okay. As if Caitlin Todd, _Kate_, wasn't lying in the flag draped casket sitting between her family and her friends. As if, when that stupid old man was finished trying to make everything okay, trying to reassure them that life would go on, she wouldn't be gone forever, lost to time, lost to him, beneath the heavy moist earth of Arlington Cemetery.

Goddamn you, he'd thought, I don't _want_ life to go on.

He'd wanted it to rain and hail and sleet. He'd wanted a fucking hurricane to come along and sweep him up like the so aptly named Dorothy Gale. He wanted to go back and stand in front of her and give Ari the finger as the bullet tore through _him_ instead of Kate.

It'd been a beautiful day and Tony had never been so enraged in his life.

He'd stood there, wanting to scrub at his face, knowing it would do no good because her blood would never come off, not ever, and wishing one of her brothers would walk over and hit him as hard as they looked like they wanted to.

They didn't and he hated them for that.

He hated Abby for trying to lean into him as she sobbed out her own heartache. Hated Gibbs for not dying because it should've been him. It was supposed to be him, Ari himself had said it was.

But it wasn't and while everyone had been so concerned with saving his ass Kate had died.

When it was over, when the Priest had finally shut up, the rest of the mourners had gone, drifting away from the gravesite and fading from his awareness like half-imagined shapes in the mist until it was only the six of them. Six, because even Palmer was there, drawn and pale.

Abby'd still been crying then, nearly hysterical in her pain, and he'd wanted to turn to her, turn on her, and tell her to shut the fuck up. Kate was dead and the world kept turning and crying wasn't going to make it better.

McGee, his own eyes red-rimmed and swollen, had seen that, had seen the sudden flash of hatred cross his face, because he'd mirrored it right back to him, angling Abby away from him without her noticing.

He'd stood there with the others, numb and savage, he didn't know how long, before the men approached, shovels in hand.

Seeing them, realizing what they intended, realizing that this was the last and final act, that she would be gone forever when these men were done, he reached for the gun he hadn't been able to leave behind, not even for this, not even for her.

He should probably be appalled at himself, at what he would've done if Gibbs hadn't caught his wrist, pinching the nerves and making his hand as numb as the rest of him; what he'd struggled against that grip to accomplish, but he wasn't. He doubts he would've been either, if he'd managed to fire off a round or two.

He'd glared at his boss, glared and spat filth in his face because it didn't matter any more, Kate was dead, dead and soon to be buried, and it didn't matter anymore, then ripped his hand free.

The men with the shovels had stood politely back, respectful and sympathetic, but still looking like men who had a job to do and wanted to get it done.

A job. She would've been nothing but another job to those men, those men who would heave shovel full after shovel full of soil over that casket, that damnable casket, until it was gone from sight, unmindful of all they were laying to rest. All the possibilities and things left unsaid. All the smiles and the taunts and the tears.

She'd wanted to be a mother and they would bury that dream without knowledge or care.

He'd snarled and, with a speed that left Gibbs clutching at air, strode over the gravediggers, who watched him without comprehension as he reached out and snatched the shovel away from the taller of the two.

Eventually Gibbs joined him. And, at some point, someone wondered off, returningwith shovels for the rest of them and together they'd laid Kate to rest.

And all the while he could hear Kateteasing himabout ruining his best suit, her voice so clear, so real and _there_ that he'd wanted to turn around and answer with his own sarcastic retort. Knowing if he did, if he turned to face the empty space she should have filled, he'd have been sick with his grief , sick with his pain and his rage.

After they finished, when all that remained was a rectangle of dark, churned earth, garish and offensive in that sea of green and white, someone reached out to him and he flinched away from the touch. He didn't want to be comforted. Accepting comfort would have been like saying things could be okay again, that _he_ could be okay again.

"Tony…", it was Abby, of course it was Abby, her voice choked, but her sobs at last silenced and he'd known she'd done that for him. Known that she'd silenced her grief because the sound of it was tearing at his ravaged soul.

He didn't want to hurt her, but then he didn't care. Kate was dead and he didn't want friendship or sympathy, didn't want her trying to _comfort _him.

He wanted it to rain. He wanted the birds silenced, wanted the so-perfectly-blue sky shredded by lightning and the day darkened by a tide of storm clouds so thick and heavy that the tempest they begat would never cease.

He wanted the world to stop and scream it's denial with him. Kate was dead and it shouldn't be so. Kate was dead and he couldn't cry and it wouldn't rain.

He'd thrown his shovel to the ground then, hating the feel of it, the weight of it, and turned away from what he couldn't forget and couldn't undo.

Kate was dead and it had been a beautiful day.


	2. Chapter 2

Disclaimer: Still not mine.

Author's Note: Sorry this took so long . I've been in the process of moving and I'm not so sure about the tense I've used here. Let me know, eh?

**The Presence Of An Absence**

_"...let the stars of twilight therefore be dark; let it look for light, but have none; neither let it see the dawning of the day."_

_-Bible_

Their mandatory week is up and as he pulls into his parking space the clock on his dashboard tells him it's five thirty in the morning, which he already knows.

He locks the doors as he gets out and wonders why. He hates this car. It's obnoxious and ostentatious and he'd bought it thinking about her; bought it because she'd have hated it on sight, because she'd have taken one look at it and rolled her eyes and probably would have made some comment about his ego, his libido, or his maturity level.

He'd wanted her to, had driven off the lot looking forward to the moment with that damnably heady mix of smug satisfaction and giddy anticipation.

The elevator doors slide shut and he tells himself to forget it, he'll sell the car, or better yet after work tonight he'll go trade it in for something more sedate. Something economical and efficient. Something that would've caused her to arch that brow of hers had she ever seen him driving it.

Early as it is for him, for almost anyone, to be coming in it doesn't surprise Tony to find Gibbs already at his desk, engrossed in the paperwork spread out before him. It's Gibbs after all and not even Kate's death is going to change the man.

Because that thought makes him want to hit him, Tony reminds himself that the former marine doesn't sleep, or doesn't sleep well, and makes his way to his own desk. Gibbs doesn't look up as he passes, doesn't acknowledge him or give him that carefully knowing look he can't seem to escape. Which is fine. If he did then Tony'd have to make some comment back or muster enough interest to conjure a look of his own when all he wants to do is to hurl something heavy and hard at the man, to make him hurt and bleed.

He knows he can't, or that he shouldn't, so he stays silent and hopes Gibbs does too. So long as he doesn't say anything, so long as he doesn't try to offer comfort or friendship, Tony thinks he might be able to ignore the ravening beast that's settled so comfortably behind his eyes and in his chest, lurking behind his tight smiles, watching for it's chance to leap out and draw blood. To share his pain with the world as it were.

The world that just went on, unchanged by the death of someone he could have loved. Someone he should have loved. Someone he'd loved too much to admit to himself or to anyone else.

And now he's sitting across from her desk (And it is still her desk, though the interns had gone toe to toe with Gibbs about it and Abby'd come up with her box just after the funeral. He'd fought with her over that, fought but not yelled because he thought once he started that he wouldn't be able to stop, wouldn't want to stop, and she'd left with an empty box.) and it's too late. She's gone and he can't tell her what everyone else seems to know and to have known all along.

He logs onto his computer and remembers that he'd brought her flowers once, remembers that she'd smiled at him, then glared, and the one had meant as much as the other. That memory tears through him now, beautiful and blinding and precious, and he clings to it. Clings to the memory. Clings to the pain that will never be enough to fill the empty places she'd left in him.

And he wonders, almost idly from within that haze of grief and anger and behind the sickening roar of that thing which wants to tear the world apart with his hands, what her brother means to do with her car.

He checks his email, something he hasn't managed to do since getting sick, before going ahead with work and is nonplussed by the number of messages in his inbox.

Twelve hundred and thirteen new messages.

Before he would have made some wise crack about his sex appeal and maybe believed it, but today he just opens the folder because the desk across from him is empty and she's gone and he's not who he used to be.

His filters are pretty good and he makes quick work of the inevitable Spam. A few clicks and it's gone, leaving him with well over nine hundred messages. He deletes the messages from the women who aren't Kate and sends the work related ones to a separate folder. That brings the total to three hundred and four. Almost all of which are dated up to, but not past, the day of Kate's death, most of them from Abby.

Most, but not all, and the fact that quite a few are from McGee catches him off guard. He wouldn't have expected that.

There's a smattering of messages from Ducky, which on a normal day would've made him smile. Today he just lets his gaze skip down the screen without interest, automatically registering the subject lines and senders. There's even one from Gibbs and some logical and overly fascinated part of him notes how much that would've meant to him when it was sent and doesn't now.

Half a dozen of the messages are from Kate.

He's stopped breathing and only realizes the fact when Gibbs finally looks up and in that pathetically cautious voice says his name. His real name. The name only his mother and Ducky ever used with any consistency.

"Anthony.," There's shock at hearing it said like that, drawn out until it's nearly a question in and of itself , a shock at realizing that that careful negotiator's tone is being used on _him_ and in Gibbs's voice no less. Yet there's an absurdity about it too because this is Gibbs and Gibbs may be gruff but he's never gentle. Not like this.," Anthony, breathe."

Isn't he already? Well, no, he supposes he's not at that, but he's not sure he wants to anyway. Breathing's largely overrated .

"Do it Dinozzo."

But she's gone, he thinks. And maybe he'll buy her car and maybe when he's sitting in the driver's seat, when he's surrounded by all those little things she's left behind, it won't hurt so damn bad anymore. But it won't change anything.

"Dinozzo!"

He hurts so damn much.

And he always will.

He takes a breath, closes the window without opening any of the messages, and makes a mental note to open an new account on a new server.," I'm fine boss."

But Gibbs is still watching him, watching and wondering and measuring , so Tony looks away from his computer, forcing himself to meet the older man's gaze head on.

It's hard, bitterly hard, to do so.

Because she's dead and he hadn't known, this man who'd always seemed to know everything else, what Ari had really intended, and there's no way, now , to take it back and make it okay. Kate is dead. Kate is _dead _and Gibbs should've known it was meant to be her.," I said I'm fine Gibbs."

"We'll get him."

Of course they will and whether that means they'll catch him and bring him in to face the civilized world's version of justice, or whether that mans something else altogether remains to be seen . Maybe they'll kill him. He wants to, more, he thinks, than he's ever wanted anything in his life because no court, no jury, will ever be able to appreciate the evil of the man and he can't tell himself that just sending him to jail will ever be enough.

"And then we just go back to normal," his voice is quiet, steady, the anger and the accusation thick and unmistakable, and there's something in his boss's eyes that tells him the man'd do anything not to hear it, that he'd do anything to have him be the same old Tony again.

But he knows that's never going to happen. You can see it in the careful, not-quite-guarded expression on his face. Kate's dead and Tony might as well have died with her and not even he, the mighty unstoppable Gibbs, can change that.

And now he's going to lie to him. To try and sooth him with the same empty platitudes the Priest had used during the funeral, the same repetitive and useless assurances he's been spurning since they brought Abby out to get him off that rooftop. Of course he'll be expected to go back to normal, whatever the hell that's supposed to mean. The world has no time or care for his grief and his loss; not even Gibbs.

"Go back," he says it almost wonderingly, as if the thought, the concept, had never occurred to him and wouldn't have. There's sorrow there, and pain, and Tony can see now that the man is tired. It occurs to him that Kate isn't the first person he's lost to violence and will not, in all likelihood, be the last. He should care, he thinks. He should care enough to let that calm the fury burning steadily beside his heart, but he doesn't and he can't.," No Tony, we don't go back. We go on."

That's how things are supposed to work, isn't it, he thinks as he turns away from Gibbs, knowing that alone gives him away. The world turns, times change, and those who are left behind go on.

But what of it?

He'll call her brother when he gets home from work about the car.


	3. Chapter 3

Disclaimer: Not mine. And I make no profit.

**The Presence Of An Absence**

_O, grief hath changed me since you saw me last, And careful hours, with Time's deformed hand, Have written strange defeatures in my face.  
__William Shakespeare_

No one expected them to exactly welcome Special Agent Keller which was wise as they wouldn't have and they didn't.

Tony can't remember speaking to her, though he knows from what came after that he must've done, can recall only looking up from his paper work to see a livid and grim faced Gibbs striding off the elevator with a slim and neat looking blond at his heels.

She was probably attractive, in her stylish and expensive gray pant suit, with her perfect hair and make up and her toothpaste commercial smile, but she wasn't Kate. She wasn't Kate and so Tony's eyes passed over her attributes unappreciative if not unseeing.

He knows she tried to catch his eye, to smile at him and only him in that way he'd stopped noticing when he was still in college. That way that was nearly an invitation and could become one with only a little attention on his part. She tried…

But his interest was fixed on Kate's desk, (And even after a month he and Gibbs refused to let it be cleared out, though they knew it would have to be eventually; if only to keep the department shrinks from taking an interest in one or the both of them. Though for himself Tony didn't doubt it was probably too late.) and for what was most likely the first time since accepting her appointment by the new Director, she hesitated and wondered about what she might have stepped into.

It was McGee who told him later of how he'd sat there, his expression blank but his eyes full of fury and loathing, as the introductions were made, of how Gibbs had almost smiled at his reaction, at his rejection, and Special Agent Keller had lost some measure of her cool composure in the face of the obvious dislike of those around her.

Which wasn't really fair of them. It wasn't her fault, after all. Not really. She hadn't asked to be assigned to work under a man who clearly didn't like her and was barely prepared to tolerate her. To be surrounded by coworkers on whom her life may well depend knowing they resented and reviled her presence. No, she wouldn't have asked for that.

But.

But there was a kind of fantastical myth surrounding Gibbs and his team wasn't there? And the prestige of belonging therein was inescapable. Maybe Agent Keller didn't ask for the appointment, but she'd accepted it, _wanted_ it, just the same.

He doesn't know what he said to her, but he can remember, as clearly and as horribly as he can remember the copper taste of _her_ blood on his tongue, thinking that this Special Agent Keller had always wanted to work with Gibbs. That maybe, somewhere in the silent places people rarely look into, she'd hoped something would happen to one of them and she'd get her in.

And now Kate was gone and here she was, polite and discomforted, but determined to prove to them all that not only was she as good as Kate, but that she was in fact better.

And Gibbs was going to give her Kate's desk.

Whatever he'd said then had made Gibbs smirk a little and sort of wince, he can remember that, and take this new Agent off to meet Abby and Ducky and Palmer. And as soon as they were gone he'd turned to McGee.

By the time Gibbs and Keller came back, maybe fifteen minutes later and certainly no longer than that, he had both of them completely moved. And if he felt a pang of something that was almost possessiveness when he glanced across the isle to see McGee settled into his desk, it was nothing compared to the bare and vicious satisfaction that coursed through him as, without missing a beat, his boss gestured toward McGee's former desk and told her to get comfortable with that predatory showing of teeth that suggested she should do anything but.

Gibbs never said anything about the desk change, and Tony supposed that he didn't quite dare.


	4. Chapter 4

Disclaimer: They belong to DPB. Who is a Sadist of the first degree.

Author's Note: Please review. Pretty please.

**Presence Of An Absence**

_"Undo it, take it back, make every day the previous one  
until I am returned to the day before the one that made you gone. _

— Nessa Rapoport

It's three years today.

As he steps out onto the roof McGee thinks about that day, thinks, not for the first time, that it would've been better if he'd been the one to go down because his death would've been less hurtful, less cataclysmic than hers. And they'd have only lost him.

Not that anybody's left, though he knows for a time they'd all considered it, all but Gibbs, it's the fact that Tony isn't okay and hasn't been. The fact that none of them know how to make him okay because something broke and shattered in Tony after Kate's death, something he won't let anyone of them near. And maybe it's selfish of him to think that they need Tony whole, but they do and he's not and in that he thinks Ari accomplished what he was after.

But they don't talk about that and never have.

When McGee finds him he's not really surprised to see that Tony's standing on the ledge, his gaze fixed to some point below which he can't discern. Last year he was sitting on the railing and the year before that he was leaning against the low wall which is somehow supposed to stop people from doing exactly what Special Agent Dinozzo is doing at that very moment. He used to think you got better with time, but he knows now that that's not true. Tony isn't getting better, not by a long shot.

"You gonna jump," It's probably a stupid question and he could probably do better but it doesn't matter. Not up here in this place that used to be hers. Not on this day.

Tony doesn't look at him, he never does, but he responds and some might take encouragement from that.

He doesn't, because this is the third year they've been through this and Tony isn't getting better, but some might have.," Is Ari still alive?"

"You know he is."

"Then I guess I'm not."

He leans against the railing and remembers the sound of that last shot, remembers that even he, untried and inexperienced as he'd been, had know that it was somehow different from the rest. More important. More dangerous.," You want to though."

"It's on my list of things to do. "

Three years and even though this conversation is all but scripted he still doesn't know what to say to him because it hurts to think about her. Hurts to remember that she'd lectured him on the fact that any one of them could die at any time, to remember teasing her that morning about calling out for Gibbs in her sleep.

"She wouldn't want this from you."

"She's dead McGee, what she'd want doesn't matter anymore."

Tony isn't getting better but he's not always like this. Most days he's still Tony and he laughs and jokes and flirts with anything even remotely female and if you didn't know you could almost believe it. Could almost miss the dark and empty spaces he thinks he hides so well on any other day.

"She'd want you to live you know."

Gibbs didn't come into work today and that too was part of the ritual. Part of how they dealt with their loss and their failure. Ari was still alive somewhere and none of them could forgive that, Gibbs and Tony least of all. So the one stayed away from work and went wherever he went and the other made his way to the roof.

"I _told_ you," and there's a bite to his voice now, sharp and vicious," that I'm _not_ going to jump."

"But you're still on the ledge."

Because Kate was three years dead and Ari was still alive.

Tony'd brushed him off that day when he'd suggested Kate might be in love with him, and he'd been joking when he said it, setting him up for what came next, but he hadn't really. She'd stayed with him in isolation when she didn't have to and during his sick leave she'd walked around laughing and teasing and hiding behind the inanities of her every day life in much the same way Tony has been for the last three years.

He'd said she was too smart for that, too smart to fall for him, and that hadn't been anything like him, not anything at all.

"It hurts you know?"

McGee starts at the sound of Tony's voice and turns to him partly in disbelief and partly in fascination. They all miss Kate, yet watching Tony slowly and meticously pull apart the threads of his life in his grief has birthed some strange species of sympathy and voyeurism within him which can neither be repressed nor ignored. What would it be like to be so completely lost to something, to someone, as Tony is to the loss of a love not realized?

And how, McGee sometimes wonders , when he's watching Abby move about the lab with something that, to his eye, is very near to grace, can he possibly bare it?

He doesn't respond to Tony's words because this familiar pattern of theirs is no longer familiar, the lines are no longer scripted, and he has no idea what he can say to this man who is both his friend and a stranger he does not, cannot know. This man he sometimes fears.

"It's like every bone in my body is shattered and cracked and every time I move they rub against each other and it hurts even more. All those broken bones grinding together."

As he speaks his voice is quite, distant, and still it almost echoes between the buildings and McGee can feel the goose flesh rising along his arms and neck. He doesn't mean to think it but it comes to him that if ever the dead have spoken they have done so in that voice, and it doesn't matter now if Tony takes a step off the ledge, or if he eats a bullet as they'd all been so worried he'd do before and after the funeral, because he's no more alive now than Kate.

He lets the silence stand between them because despite everything he loves his friend and doesn't think now that words are wise. Tony will stand there as long as he wishes and he will go on until Ari is in prison or dead and that, for him, will be the end of all things.

Suddenly he remembers the sound of Kate's voice as she called out for Tony after the explosion of that car, the fear and the panic therein had nearly made him sick, and before he can stop himself he says what none of them have dared, not even Abby," She loved you, you know that. Don't you?"

"That doesn't make it better.," Tony snarls and scuffs his shoe against the ledge.

No, McGee thinks with a sigh, it probably wouldn't.


	5. Chapter 5

Disclaimer: Obviously not mine

**The Presence of an Absence**

_Grief tears his heart, _

_and drives him to and fro, _

_In all the raging impotence of woe.  
-__Homer ("Smyrns of Chios")_

"I'm not trying to take her place."

They're on their third replacement since Keller, which makes this woman the fourth , and they have all of them said it. To him, to Abby, to Ducky and Gibbs, and on one memorable occasion even to Tony. It's as if the words have become they're mantra and McGee thinks if he has to hear it one more time he might finally believe it's okay to hit girls.

She's not trying to take her place, she says, and beyond the repetitive quality of the comment there remains the fact that she and every other Agent who's been assigned to the team in the last three and a half years is lying out right. They wouldn't even be talking to her if she weren't Kate's replacement, assigned once again by the Director to fill the empty slot on their roster.

And Tony's taking it no better than he ever has; watching the woman with hungry hateful eyes as she works beside them, beside him, in the place that belongs to Kate and Kate alone.

It doesn't help matters that the woman keeps hitting on him, flaunting the fact that he always smiles and flirts back. Flaunting what she thinks is some kind of victory or conquest.

Yet Tony is just being Tony, pretending all is well until it isn't anymore, waiting for the perfect moment to shatter whatever ego the woman might have. There's something cruel in the Senior Agent now that was never there before, something that wants to hurt and maim, to spread his pain across the landscape.

And sometimes it's even worse than that.

Too often now he's heard Tony say that if she doesn't back off, if she doesn't stop and just leave him alone he's going to kill her.

Mcgee doesn't really think he will but he's told Abby to warn her off just the same. It's hard to predict what Tony will or will not do anymore and the murder of their replacement Agent would be a hell of a mess to cover up.


End file.
